84 Quotes About Hard-boiled

You know who they are?” Tony said softly. “I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right.” (I'll be waiting)

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)

His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in. (Guns at Cyrano's)

The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting)

Carli’s was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill)

A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound—after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's)

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)

It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed.

Howard got sex-crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab's Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty's yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes's--one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises' fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself.